Figures from the United Lincolnshire Hospital Trust show that admissions for drug misuse in 2018 were substantially lower than 2017.
According to the figures gained through a Freedom of Information request for LSJ News, admissions for misuse, that included every drug from cocaine to paracetamol, dropped from 442 in 2016/17 to 278 in 2018.
Problems in the city regarding the synthetic drug which goes by the street name ‘spice’, were acted on by the City of Lincoln Council in August 2018.
The City Council spent a total of £61,000 to give specialist support for addiction and mental health after the city centre was being used to fuel people’s drug habits.
Data shows that drug admissions in Lincolnshire were at their highest in 2014/15 at a total of 514, but these figures have dropped since.
The data still gave shocking figures, including a range of admissions from age one up to 93 years old.
Tom Schemmel, who has worked for the ambulance service for five years spoke about his experience with drug misuse:
“The majority of admissions the service deals with are either heroin or other opiates. We have something called narcan/naloxone which reverses the effects of opiates which we give to them at the place where they overdose.”
“Nine out of ten times once the person has recovered they will be non-compliant or not want to go to hospital.”
“In these kind of situations we have to give them something called a ‘loading dose’ to tie them over and stop them from overdosing again.”
Other figures demonstrated three admissions from 11 and 12 year olds and 120 between the ages of 13 and 18.
It is not just young people involved, those between the ages 30 and 50 showed a total of 1484 admissions since 2012.
Tom says there is still work to be done:
“When someone who overdoses goes to hospital they are asked if they want to be referred onto other things to help.”
“In my experience though, I don’t think I have ever seen someone that has overdosed on heroine willingly go to hospital in the first place.”